


Hallucinations Are Good For the Soul

by I_Am_Not_A_Robot



Category: Escape from Furnace - Alexander Gordon Smith
Genre: Book 2: Solitary, M/M, sadness and nothing else
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-18
Updated: 2019-10-18
Packaged: 2020-12-21 14:03:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 936
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21076088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/I_Am_Not_A_Robot/pseuds/I_Am_Not_A_Robot
Summary: Alex Sawyer is just about to give up, but his favorite hallucination is trying to pull him back from the ledge.





	Hallucinations Are Good For the Soul

  
Alex was delirious, that's all there was to it.

The darkness provided no help, and its warm embrace was not that of a hug, but of hell-fire. The walls felt as tight as ever, and he's sure that the only reason he hadn't curled up into a ball, suffocating of claustrophobia, was because it was too dark to see the tight quarters (of his own personal coffin).

The unending darkness was the void that both acted as the wall and the bridge to his unraveling sanity. And since Zee was asleep, Alex really had no one to talk to, if only to chase the loneliness and crushing despair away.

No one to talk to... except the voices in his head, apparently.

With the current circumstances, he felt a twinge of guilt at being not happy, but instead _annoyed_ to see the glimmering mirage that served as his dead friend. But yes, it's annoyance he felt, not cheer. The Penitentiary made sure to beat every drop of that out of him. How long had it been since he'd seen sunlight? A week? A month? A year?

When you're down in solitary, it's impossible to tell.

As usual, Donovan appeared at first as a string of glowing webbing, something that slowly grew more and more thick until it coalesced into the fuzzy, blurry form of his friend.

Donovan smiled. "Y'don't look too hot there, Alex."

Alex scoffed. "Really? As if you can see me. You're just in my head, and unless I'm astral projecting without realizing it, there's no way I can see myself right now. So you can't either. I haven't exactly happened upon any mirrors down here."

That friendly smile only grows sadder, slipping, falling away. "I've missed you, y'know."

"No, I've missed _you_." And that was the truth. His brain had just taken his own grieving heart and forced it upon the image it conjured of Donovan, taking his own words and putting them in another mouth, if only to process them easier. "But you're dead."

"Perhaps." Somehow, Donovan looked sad. Like this hallucination actually knew what happened.

Gut-wrenching images forced themselves into Alex's brain, both startling and unwelcome enough to make him wince. He couldn't stop the memory of the last time he'd seen Donovan, chained up to that metal sarcophagus, awaiting a horrible death-- or worse, surgery, being turned into a soulless monster, killing those he once loved...

"I _know_ you're dead," Alex snapped. He didn't know why he said it, but he couldn't stop himself from continuing. "You're better off that way. Better than- better than being turned into one of _them_." He jerked his head upwards, vaguely in the direction he knew the stitched-up prison guards were. "I miss you, I really do, but you're not really here. And I'm NOT going to listen to ghosts of my past tell me what to do. You're gone, and I'm just stuck a mile beneath the dirt, pathetically talking to conjurations of--"

"Please! LISTEN TO ME, Alex!"

The desperation in Donovan's voice was enough to get Alex to shut up. His mouth shut tight, and he tore his eyes away from the blackness that served as the wall and to the glowing boy in front of him, the only bit of light he had. If he looked hard enough, he thought he could see Donovan's warm light reflecting off the walls.

It was almost like his spirit was really here, talking.

"Alex. I... I need you to listen. You're going to get out of here, and you have to stop worrying about me. You don't have any control of what happens to you, or me, or hell, any of us. So stop feeling guilty about what happened to me. You need to know something." He took a step closer, kneeling right in front of the smaller boy.

A blink, and Donovan didn't look like himself; a blink, and he was human again.

"I believe in you. I love you, you know that? Please, you need to get out of here. I don't want to watch you rot your youth away down in some corrupted prison. It's sunny up there right now. Did you know that? The sun feels so warm. You're pale as hell, Alex. Get your ass up there."

With those words, he began to evaporate once more.

Alex cried out for him to stay, contradicting his earlier thoughts, but the nonexistent glowing webbing didn't listen. Instead of fading out into the darkness, the specks of light seemed to rise up, through the metal hatch, up, farther and farther. And maybe Alex really was losing it, because if he squinted, it was like he saw a tunnel all the way out.

A tunnel with a patch of sunlight waiting for him, penny small, at the top. And Donovan's spirit was dancing up there in the daylight.

A blink, and it was gone. Nothing but heavy darkness remained. That, and an oddly familiar flicker of warm hope deep inside Alex's core. Something inside him reignited once more. Something inside remembered how he got here, how close he was to escaping before.

And he knew he could do it again. He could escape, and he'd make it. He'd dance outside too, and he wouldn't care whether it was sunny or raining. Fresh air seemed like a dream to him. Freedom was all he could hope for. Freedom, justice, and watching Furnace burn to the ground.

Maybe Furnace Penitentiary hadn't beaten all of Alex's will out of him. Not yet. Not when he knew there was an angel up there, caring for and missing him. 


End file.
